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Physical proximity supports various forms of ad-hoc collaboration among developers such as opportunistic task adaptation and helping co-developers when they are stuck. Connecting the input/output flows of stand-alone programming environments of distributed developers offers the potential to support such collaboration among them. Such a connection has several components including communication sessions, awareness of others' availability and the state of the objects on which they are working, and control channels allowing users to import edits of and share code with others and be notified when a team member has moved away from a program element of interest. It is possible to develop a collaboration-centered design that combines a variety of collaboration streams into a usable and useful user-interface, and implement the design using existing programming environment, communication, and compiler technologies.
Hegde et al. (Mon,) studied this question.